Monday, February 11, 2008

Challenger E-mail

The following is an email from a challenger commenting on our refutations of William Lane Craig's arguments, featured in Episode 11: Bizarro World. My response to the challenger is offered in the post immediately following this one.

Anton writes:

"Objective" Atheistic morals are as groundless as "objective" Christian morals. Objective morality is yet unknown to humanity due to the fact that omniscience hasn't been achieved as we know it. There is also the same amount of proof that god exists as there is that he doesn't.

Your first arguments are ineffective against the person from "Reasonable Faith". Any reasonable Christian will tell you that Jesus changed how sin works. All of your biblical citations are from the old testament. This just tells me that you've never argued against a reasonable Christian. Your second argument tells me you know nothing about early Christian history. There is no proof pointing either way about any of it.

You could have attacked the assumptions he makes in his premises, but no, you remain as deluded as your "bizarro" counterpart by even accepting that objective morality is known to exist.

But, I'm a nihilist, and because of that, I'm frequently disregarded by anyone with any belief (such as yourselves). So feel free to keep doing what you're doing. No action is objectively preferable to another.

I wonder if you are familiar with the work of evolutionary psychologist Dr. Kevin Macdonald?

He has studied and written extensively on Judaism which he posits is a group evolutionary strategy (GES).

Macdonald shows how Judaism has given Jews in the diaspora an edge in reproductive fitness by boosting their ability as a group to compete for limited resources.

As a consequence of this GES Ashkennazi ("European") Jews in particular were for millenia subject to eugenic selective pressures which raised their group average IQ to around 115, cultivated an extreme ethnocentric moral outlook ("Is it good for the Jews?"), and enabled a remarkable degree of group genetic continuity.

All this is evidenced by contemporary Ashkenzazi Jewish over representation, if not outright domination, in the areas of finance, acedemia, media, and political influence in contemporary Western countries.

So, if the propositions about reality that make up the content of religion are not true would you at least concede that sometimes they are adaptive?

This is patently false. All human beings are faced with one supreme moral question, whether to live or to die. We as humans qua humans face this choice when we face objective reality. By acknowledging the ultimate nature of existence, we implicitly affirm instantiation of the ultimate moral choice. To live and to promote the things that enable human life is the good. To die and to promote the things that are detrimental to human life is evil. That this is objectively true follows from the truth of science. Methodological naturalism is the best way human beings have of ascertaining of what reality actually consists. The uniformity of nature, the laws of logic, the efficacy of science all testify to the objectivity of reality. This is not a cartoon universe no matter how ardently theists or nihilists wish it to be. Human consciousness functions in absolute reality and is able to distinguish the difference between living and death. To live and to promote that which is beneficial to human life is therefore objectively good. That which, like theism or nihilism, promotes those things and beliefs that are detrimental to human life are evil. Read Dawson Bethrick's "The Cartoon Universe of Theism" at http://www.strongatheism.net/library/atheology/cartoon_universe_of_theism/